As yesterday’s impeachment hearings concluded late Tuesday evening, MSNBC All In host Chris Hayes was ready to fret over the state of democracy, with his left-wing guests, New York Times’ frenzied opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg and two Democratic operatives who worked for the Clinton and Obama administrations.
After playing some clips from the hearing, former Associate White House Counsel for President Obama, Ian Bassin, was aghast that Republicans would question the credibility of the Democrat witness, Alexander Vindman. He fretted, “At what point do you come out and say that's not okay, Lieutenant Colonel Vindman is patriot and we should defend him?”
That prompted Hayes to gush over a “moving” clip of Vindman telling his father during his testimony that he’d “be fine for telling the truth.” The MSNBC host raved over that statement, to his equally affected guest, Goldberg, about how important the “stakes” were:
You know, Michelle, you're tearing up right now, but what I find moving about that is that it's refocusing on and to Walter's point how existential the stakes are here. We either have a country in which if the president wants you to do something corrupt you do it, and that's the way it works... Or you have a country where the law is meaningful, where independent civil servants make moral and legal judgments about appropriateness or not in which co-equal branches of government can offer checks. And that's really what the essential question before everyone right now is about.
After admitting she had a mental breakdown after the 2016 election, a teary-eyed Goldberg claimed she was still surprised that Donald Trump had turned America into Russia, (what?!). She then perpetuated the media’s hysteria that by speaking out against Trump, these witnesses were putting their lives at risk:
So I think I was on your show the day after the election and I was profoundly alarmed and depressed. And I think even then I didn't think within three years the United States would fall so far towards being a sort of authoritarian state like Turkey, like Russia where the leader does what he wants. You know, the party closes ranks around him, and his word is law and everybody else basically submits and risks their safety if they defy him.
After that hyperbole, she followed Hayes and Bassin in praising the witnesses as patriots who could have no ulterior motives or biases: “We've seen these people, these kind of emissaries from the America we remember from just three years ago, you know, these people who are completely suffused with these extremely earnest patriotic values…"
Goldberg finished her rant by arguing the country had only two choices: Trust these patriotic Americans or “fall in line” under President Trump.
Fellow guest, former acting U.S. Solicitor General under Bill Clinton, Walter Dellinger followed that nonsense by blasting Republicans in Congress as an angry mob who had intimidated the witnesses:
[I] think we're seeing a slow motion constitutional crisis. When you could have a mob behind the President, when he's calling out the whistle-blower and you see the anger in the faces behind him, intimidating witnesses....asserting that they've made a unilateral decision in the executive branch that the congressional inquiry is illegitimate. That's the end of congressional oversight as we know it if it's allowed to stand.
